President Obama’s toughest Syria hurdle: The calendar

On the short list of seemingly intractable obstacles to President Barack Obama’s Syria plans: a war-weary nation, the feckless United Nations — and the Gregorian calendar.

From the beginning, Obama’s recent Syria push has been hobbled by the calendar — and the scheduling snarls only get worse from here. Obama will sit Monday for interviews for six TV news programs, which will air within an hour of what had promised to be the week’s most highly anticipated Washington event: the NFL Redskins’ season opener against Philadelphia.

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McDonough's Sunday show blitz

Syria: Timeline of crisis

But while Obama traveled to Europe for the G-20 and a trip to Sweden last week, opinions on striking Syria have hardened. Scores of members of Congress have publicly come out against the use-of-force authorization, even as the administration has briefed, or offered briefings, for every member of Congress. Polls show Americans oppose intervention by large and growing margins.

If Monday Night Football pushed Obama’s address to the nation on Syria to Tuesday, odds are low for the president to have the nation’s attention to himself the rest of the week either.

The Sept. 11 anniversary comes Wednesday, the same day the Senate could vote for cloture. Yom Kippur begins Friday night.

Obama won’t even have Tuesday to himself. Hillary Clinton is due to deliver a speech that afternoon in Philadelphia. Voters in New York City will head to the polls for that city’s primary elections. And the new iPhone event scheduled for that day has become an annual media spectacle.

Then there are the seasonal realities to grapple with: Many Americans are spending time getting their children to start new school years — and the launch of a new fall TV season is underway, in an era when the nation already pays less attention to presidential addresses than during the days before 1,000-channel cable TV lineups.

“How do you hold the attention of the American people when it is increasingly hard to do so with the distractions of the NFL season and religious holidays and back-to-school nights?” said Mike McCurry, a press secretary for Bill Clinton. “This is the challenge of the presidency, the ability to gather the nation around a common campfire is just not there anymore. You have to go for the sporadic bursts of attention and deal with the perpetual A.D.D. that people have.”

Timing has worked against the White House from the very start. The Aug. 21 attack that prompted the administration to gear up for a Syria strike left Obama violating his predecessor’s key rule on selling the public on a war: Don’t do it in August.

“From a marketing point of view,” George W. Bush chief of staff Andrew Card said in 2002 as that White House began its Iraq war sales pitch, ”you don’t introduce new products in August.”

The Bush administration’s Iraq war rollout, which began that Sept. 11, included a war authorization vote on the eve of the midterm elections and lasted nearly six months.

The brutality of Assad’s latest chemical weapons attack, which the White House has said killed 1,400 people near Damascus, didn’t allow the administration the luxury of waiting for anyone — be they members of Congress or the public — to return from summer vacation, said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama National Security Council spokesman who visited the White House last week to discuss Syria strategy with staffers there.

“It takes time to get clarity on what exactly happened — you want them to think through what happened, and do consultation,” Vietor said Saturday. “The timing is what it is, there isn’t any way they could change that.”

Still, the administration has done itself few favors in rolling out its case for striking the Assad regime.

The push to attack Syria began in earnest the last week of August, with Congress gone and much of the American public trying to enjoy the final days of summer.

By the time the administration finally presented its declassified evidence that Assad had gassed his own people and Secretary of State John Kerry made a definitive case for attacking the regime, it was the Friday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend.

“Syria didn’t sneak up on us three weeks ago,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a White House antagonist who opposes authorizing force against Syria. “This has been a growing problem for nearly two years. President Obama and Secretary [Hillary] Clinton totally failed from day one to deal with the problem, articulate a strategy and communicate with Congress.”